Birmingham’s Eastside story: making steps towards sustainability?

Sustainability has come to play a dominant discursive role in the UK planning system, particularly relating to urban regeneration. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the role that sustainability plays in a major regeneration programme, known as Eastside, currently underway in Birmingham, the UK. That this £6 billion redevelopment is now widely talked about by such key players as Birmingham City Council and the Regional Development Agency, Advantage West Midlands, as having a central sustainability agenda points to the growing importance of the ideal of sustainability in planning and regeneration agendas. In this paper, we investigate in detail how and why sustainability has become part of the planning discourse for Eastside and critically evaluate what impact, if any, this is having on public policy decision-making

The geographies of access to enterprise finance: the case of the West Midlands, UK

The geographies of access to enterprise finance: the case of the West Midlands, UK, Regional Studies. Whilst there is a long history of credit rationing to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK, the financial crisis has seen banks retreat further from lending to viable SMEs due to a reassessment of risk and lack of available capital. In so doing, the credit crunch is thought to be creating new geographies of financial exclusion. This paper explores the financial inclusion of enterprise through community development finance institutions (CDFIs) which provide loan finance to firms at the commercial margins in the West Midlands, UK. The paper concludes that CDFIs could partially address the financial exclusion of enterprise as an additional, alternative source of finance to that of mainstream banks

Spatializing the Ecological Leviathan: Territorial Strategies and the Production of Regional Natures

This paper explores a dual absence – the absence of the state within contemporary geographical analyses of nature; and the absence of nature within contemporary explorations of state power. We argue that the modern state continues to play a crucial role in framing social interactions with nature, while nature is still vital to states within their realization of different forms of material and ideological power. In order to reconnect analyses of the state and nature, this paper combines work on the production of nature and state strategy with Lefebvre’s recently translated writings on state space and territory. By focusing on the production of territory (or state space), we explore the interaction of the state and nature in the context of the political management of social and ecological space. We unravel the spatial entanglements of the state and nature through an analysis of the British state’s territorial strategies within the West Midlands region. By considering three key historical periods within the history of the West Mid-lands we reveal how the emergence of the regional space called the West Midlands is a product of the ongoing spatial dialectics of state and nature therein

Draft regional planning guidance for the West Midlands

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:OP-LG/7175 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Higher level skills and employment The Higher Education Regional Development Fund in the West Midlands

SIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre-DSC:GPE/3822 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Draft regional planning guidance for the West Midlands (RPG11) Schedule of the Secretary of State's proposed changes and statement of reasons for changes : public consultation September 2003

Title from coverSIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:m03/39161 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Draft regional planning guidance for the West Midlands (RPG11) incorporating the Secretary of State's proposed changes Public consultation September 2003

Title from coverSIGLEAvailable from British Library Document Supply Centre- DSC:m03/39160 / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo

Regional Governance in England: A Changing Role for the Government's Regional Offices?

Debates about the appropriate territorial scales of government to meet the challenges of economic, political and social change have gained momentum in Western Europe in recent years. In the UK, political mobilization has transformed constitutional arrangements in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. By contrast, in the English regions, a less radical approach has been adopted, but the outcome has been a strengthening of the institutions of regional governance. A key feature has been the enhanced responsibilities of the Government Offices for the Regions, which have been encouraged to build on their traditional administrative functions and adopt a more strategic role. This article explores the Offices' contribution to regional and local governance. Our central argument is that although increasingly expected to act as a bridgehead between national and sub-national government and a focus for regional policy coordination, their potential role in filling the missing gap in English regional governance has not yet been fully grasped